Buy Or Don’t Buy

Or, “How A Cliché Changes Its Usage, In Five Easy Steps”
I: Status Quo
November 4, 2005:
What’s more important: talent, coaching, or swagger? These quotes may help you decide. Each tells us something important about that magical gait.
[...] FOX’s Adam Schein, on the Cowboys’ rout of the Eagles a month ago: “Finally, swagger and aggressiveness from the [...]

I first realized I liked Joanna Newsom when I listened to “Colleen” and thought it sounded a lot like Kate Bush; I first realized I loved Joanna Newsom when I looked up the lyrics to “Colleen” and discovered it was about a woman in Victorian England coming to grips with the fact that she used [...]

Sara and I are very confused about this commercial:

What is going on with these two? Are they lesbians — or, being the only two young nuns, are they just very good friends? Also, are nuns even allowed to wear bikinis, or is that a hint that they are leaving the church altogether? How will we [...]

The most offensive part of my day is undoubtedly the 30 seconds I spend walking through the parade of advertising that is the 47-50th Street subway station. For the past few months the ads in this station have been exclusively for the little-seen and little-loved Spike-TV comedy “Blue Mountain State.” Most of them are offensive [...]

I owe Jay Leno an apology. For much of my life I’ve thought of him as a complacent old hack on the wrong side of history, with nothing better to do than spent his time telling humorless and mean-spirited jokes to an audience that thinks predictability breeds hilarity. I was making the cardinal sin of [...]

Last April in Comedy class I was given the task of performing a five-minute stand-up comedy routine. Being the groundbreaking envelope-pusher that I am, i was determined to fill my five minutes with what i deemed ‘anti-comedy’: jokes that were so purposefully unfunny that they circled back around to become funny again.
But as I performed [...]

Another QuickHits edition: Because why write paragraphs when you can write sentences?
Don’t Buy: NBC - This is getting sad. Jeff Zucker: To paraphrase Kanye, you need to run your business like you have some type of respect for yourself.
Don’t Buy: The Facebook Bra Meme - I am Facebook friends with my mom and my grandma [...]

Hey, remember when “Avatar” made lots of money? Let’s use that as an opportunity to learn all the wrong lessons!
From USA Today:
This week, ESPN announced plans to launch an all-sports 3D [television] network on June 11, starting with World Cup soccer and eventually including the Summer X Games (extreme sports) and college basketball and college [...]

Readers, there are many times in life where you will find yourself presented with a total information overload. The next one minute and 49 seconds will be like that for you:

Where can we even begin to reckon with this? It’s best to start by eliminating the obvious. I’m not going to tread the well-worn path [...]

Jim Emerson, editor of RogerEbert.com and proprietor of the wonderful film blog Scanners, has been re-uploading his video essays to a new server and in the process bringing them to my mind after a long absence. His best so far is this “free association dream sequence” from October 2007 centered around the theme of close-ups:

close-up [...]